Z.'s investigation into literary allusion in Aristophanes' Peace is an important study in a drama that until quite recently had perhaps the strongest claim to neglect among Aristophanes' eleven surviving works. The book is a lightly revised and updated publication of Z.'s 2013 doctoral dissertation written under the direction of M. Baumbach at the University of Zurich. It is a very good example of careful, conservative philology informed by a sophisticated theoretical framework and supported by meticulous attention to published scholarship. Readers will be unsurprised to learn that the text displays many of the familiar hallmarks of a doctoral dissertation: the book's project and its documentation is somewhat mechanical and repetitious; occasionally there is a little too much eagerness to mention the slighter matters in which scholars and their publications sometimes err; and the focus is much sharper on the granular and technical details of Aristophanes’ language than it is on questions of what, in the end, Peace was ‘really all about’ in the literary and historical landscape in which Aristophanes wrote. However, Z.'s prose is unfailingly lucid and precise, and his characterisation of problems both textual and literary judicious and balanced. His sensitivity to Aristophanic poetry and his keen attention to linguistic detail remind the reader of the work of scholars like M. Silk and A. Willi.

Z. prefers the overarching term ‘Intertextualität’ to characterise his study of passages in Peace that refer to other texts, but he carefully refines the operative definition to focus on literary allusion. He concentrates on ‘Einzeltextreferenzen’, passages where Aristophanes quotes, parodies or otherwise alludes to a concrete literary text, as opposed to ‘Systemreferenzen’, meaning references behind which no particular text stands: for example, generic pastiche such as paratragedy. In every case of allusion a measure of lexical agreement between Peace and the ‘reference text’ will be present, described as an intertextual ‘inscribing’ or ‘trace’ (p. 15). The reader of Peace is made aware of the relationship to another literary text through ‘Intertextualitätsignalen’, signposts of literary allusion. These signals may be explicit or implicit, stronger or weaker. For example, the mention of the name of the author or text constitutes a strong explicit signal. Weaker signals are found in ‘Inkongruenzen’, incongruent features such as changes of metre, departures from the usual rules of Attic comic prosody and other stylistically marked features (lexical, morphological, syntactical, dialectal and so forth). At the point where the faintest implicit signals can no longer be heard is drawn the boundary Z. terms the ‘Bezugshorizont’ (the horizon of reference), within which lie all the texts the reader must know, or be able to locate and read, to have the literary competence to understand intertextuality in Peace.

It is a crucial point of methodology for Z., and one which he very persuasively defends (pp. 16–23), that Aristophanes’ plays were, from the first, written not only for performance but also to be enjoyed in textual form by readers, admittedly most likely to have been a narrowly circumscribed group of the highly educated and probably wealthy. Z. is careful not to privilege the reader's reception of the play over that of an audience at a performance, but emphasises the different interpretative possibilities and questions that a written text presents to a reader with the leisure and access to papyrus rolls necessary for dwelling on the complexities of literary allusion: in particular, whether to see general pastiche or specific parody, to what extent the context of an allusion bears on the meaning of the scene in which it appears and how much of the context counts as contextual for the purposes of intertextual interpretation (p. 34).

The heart of the book is the second chapter, which is arranged alphabetically by author and treats systematically the passages of literary allusion in Peace. In each case the author and his relevant intertexts are introduced with reconstruction of fragmentary intertexts where necessary. Then the intertextual signposts are evaluated, before the analysis of an ‘intertextual reading’ is presented alongside a succinct description of the scene in Peace to which the intertextual passage belongs. The great majority of such passages are found in three scenes in Peace: Trygaeus’ flight on the dung-beetle (Pax 114–55), in which plentiful reference to Euripides and Aesop is found; the parabasis (729–818), where the introductory verses in the odes allude to Stesichorus, while the kommation and pnigos evoke Pherecrates and Simonides; and the later episode (1265–304) in which the sons of Lamachus and Cleonymus sing verses from the Theban cycle, the Iliad, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, and from Archilochus, while Trygaeus for his part alludes to Alcaeus.

At the same time that Z. offers a view of Aristophanes’ Peace as a text for readers, he assumes a reserved attitude towards what may count as a literary allusion. He accepts in total 31 literary allusions (p. 29), and a lengthy appendix (p. 219–59) discusses passages where arguably intertextual play is to be found but in which Z. sees insufficient warrant on the basis of Aristophanes’ usual practice of signalling his literary allusions. Z. is more concerned with how intertextuality acts upon the reader than with Aristophanes’ intentions in creating meaning through it (p. 30), or indeed with how the abundance of intertexuality in Peace bears on the meaning of the play as a whole. Perhaps not all readers will be satisfied with Z.'s rather severe view of the frontiers of intertextuality and cautious approach to the boundaries of interpretation, but surely every reader will find his discussion a handy and reliable guide to literary allusion in Peace.

Z.'s volume will be indispensable reading for scholars interested in Aristophanes’ Peace, nor can the textual criticism of fragments of ancient authors whose tradition passes through Peace or its scholia afford to ignore it: among these are the tragedian Achaeus, Aeschylus, Archilochus, Ion of Chios, the tragedian Melanthius, the comic poet Pherecrates, Simonides and Stesichorus. Moreover, Z.'s book deserves to be consulted by all who venture to write on that perennial topic in Aristophanes scholarship of the comic poet's engagement with the tragedies of Euripides.